Not Pretty Enough

by Gerri Hirshey

  Helen kept typing; she set the lynchpin of her immodest proposal right on page thirteen of the manuscript: “This then is not a study on how to get married but how to stay single—in superlative style.”

  * * *

  She worked on the book all day on Saturdays and part of Sundays, leaving time for the Will Rogers walks with David. On weekday afternoons in the office, she put aside the charts of lipstick shades and stacked storyboards. She clacked along on her manual machine, looser of wrists and lighter of spirit. The title of her first sample chapter, aimed squarely at all that dull and uninformed spinster-pity, was a lapel-grabber: “WOMEN ALONE? OH COME NOW!”

  Helen cast off any ill-fitting writerly language, stuck with the confessional and the colloquial, and began to tell her own story. She might have been talking to her reader over a tuna salad plate at Woolworth’s lunch counter: Listen, kiddo …

  I am not beautiful or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor and I have always helped support them. I’m an introvert and I am sometimes mean and cranky …

  But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserved him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him.

  She told the truth as she saw it: Any girl willing to work at it could do as she did. No one need be defeatist about being single. She summoned the anger that had been aroused by the Look article and the rest of the depressing media cant: “Frankly, the magazines and their marriage statistics give me a royal pain. There is a more important truth that magazines never deal with, that single women are too brainwashed to figure out, that married women know but won’t admit, that married men and single men endorse in a body, and that is that the single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the new glamour girl of our times.”

  So to hell with it! To hell with the pity parties, the dismal surveys, and the finger-wagging pundits. It was Mrs. Brown’s sincere desire to gently deprogram the brainwashed single women, those “frantic hordes,” and set them on a sensible path to fulfillment in love and work. No one else had made the effort, at least not in such a direct, concerted way.

  What we now call the self-help book genre was hardly new; Dale Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has burgeoned into a personal training empire still winning fat contracts with corporate HR departments nationwide. The twin sisters Pauline Phillips, writing as Abigail Van Buren (Dear Abby), and Eppie Lederer (under the pen name Ann Landers) dispensed a folksier pastiche of syndicated advice and etiquette from the mid-fifties onward. But that middlebrow school of self-improvement relied on conservative canon: chaste, Calvinist, and dull as dirt. This was not for a scrabbler such as Helen, who complained that “most of the advice givers were still pretty puritanical—Abigail van Buren, Joyce Brothers, churches, teachers. Unless a girl could afford to go to a psychiatrist, which I had done, there wasn’t really anybody terribly hip who would be responsive to questions she would dare not ask anyone else.” She would position herself as a different sort of girls’ guide: “I was the sophisticated older sister in whom they could confide.”

  As she wrote, she heard the sentences as a private conversation—just us girls. Having been there, she could anticipate those Questions Never Asked and provide some meticulous and slightly lubricious operating instructions. The book Helen had outlined was a practicum and was never intended as an overtly feminist tract. Systemic change was not at all on her radar; instead she addressed herself to bettering the small, quotidian lives toiling within the status quo—those, herself included, she would come to call “mouseburgers.” Sexism was not even in her vocabulary, though it had dogged and demeaned her relentlessly. Let someone else tackle the social and intellectual aspects of the problem; she was a realist, not a revolutionary. Anger may have fueled some of her own advances, but she believed less in getting revenge than in getting busy. Fear was ever at hand; she was forthright about her own failures of nerve along the way, and acknowledged it as both a shackle and an animator.

  An invigorated Helen kept at it; David kept fine-tuning. What she came up with reads like a crazy quilt of truth and dare, justice and compromise, good sense and downright inanity. There would be much to admire and plenty to wince at; some of her idiosyncratic man-hunting tips bordered on parody: “Some girls keep a chinning bar across the door of their offices. Men love to use it when they swing through the door and it’s good for you, too. You can get one with green stamps. Two books.”

  Her petite economies ran from the savvy to the euuwww: “Give the man who showers at your apartment a luscious, toga-size terry bath sheet. Sometimes you can buy seconds at a sale.” “Negotiate with doctor’s offices about bills … Wear your oldest clothes and emphasize your modest circumstances.” “Try to like kidneys, hearts, liver, brains…”

  She offered no overnight transformations and confessed that many times she had “worked like a rat” in the office and in bed with a man just to get by. Her own journey had been a creep, not a leap, and she counseled the sensibly incremental approach: “I know that everybody is always tugging at you to shuck off your slob suit, to be as dynamic as Ethel Merman, as well-adjusted as Lassie, to learn Portuguese, cook with seaweed, embrace Yoga, know Shakespeare. At the very least you must sandpaper your calloused heels and organize your closets.”

  Helen’s Way was a working girl’s iteration of Kobayashi Issa’s classic haiku:

  Oh snail

  Climb Mount Fuji,

  But slowly, slowly.

  Even if your prince wasn’t waiting at the top, the journey could and should transform, she insisted. The tone was never shrill or salacious; Helen addressed her reader calmly, as though she were suggesting a new form of pressed face powder: “Perhaps you will reconsider the idea that sex without marriage is dirty.”

  The corollaries to that audacious principle were simple yet incendiary for the times. Mrs. Brown’s growing manuscript declared that it was okay—even imperative—to enjoy sex outside marriage. That equal rights for women should extend to the bedroom. That meaningful work outside the home was essential to a woman’s security and self-esteem. Regardless of Helen’s intent at the time, the book’s combination of cheerleading and how-to’s did indeed presage the self-help boom and an unapologetic, self-affirming “second wave” feminism that would rise up in the ensuing decade.

  About the pippy-poo aspects: Helen had a way of slipping off the moral high ground and into the inane and undermining. A good part of the problem lay in the breezy way she framed things: “I needn’t remind you: career girls are sexy. A man likes to sleep with a brainy girl. She’s a challenge. If he makes good with her, he figures he must be good himself.”

  Of course there were shortcuts and temptations toward itty-bitty venial sins: You work hard, for little pay and scant appreciation. Pilfer from petty cash if you can. Whenever possible, men should pay for everything. The manuscript went deep Lorelei with examples from her own scuffling days: Diamonds (or even a bus fare paid for by a beau) can be a girl’s best friend when she’s wondering how to make next week’s rent. A man should always replace the liquor he drank chez toi. Take it from a child of the Depression: M-O-N-E-Y rules, and you’d be a fool, darling, not to accept cash and “prezzies” from a man you’ve been, um, entertaining.

  Helen did not talk down to her reader but looked her straight in the eye; she was addressing her own, still-struggling underclass. Her message was beamed to working single women with limited options and means, those who were still thrashing in the steno pool, who slept fitfully in a metal crown of bobby pins when the salon was too dear. The text is larded with reminders of Helen’s unlovely journey upward, even in her apartment advice: “Creep up on decorating as you would any new skill. Remember how long it took to learn shorthand?”

  In its way, Helen’s littl
e book was as much a class struggle as a feminist imperative. In her manifesto, the Single Girl, long the outlier in two-by-two Leave It to Beaver–land, was swept past those tedious tract ranch kitchens and told she deserved the best table in the house—at Sardi’s, the Polo Lounge … and in the boardroom. It carried a stern caveat: nobody’s going to hand it to you, sister. Hers was not a plan for sissies: “There is a catch to achieving single bliss. You have to work like a son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  Helen neatened up her opening salvo and showed it to David.

  “I think you’ve got it. This is nice. Now go!”

  Rather than being peeved that she had veered from his original vision for the book, he seemed excited by its headstrong new direction. His enthusiasm was galvanizing for both of them, Helen said. “There apparently aren’t many men who encourage their wives to take on some professional adventure. But David was like a child with twelve pounds of Swiss chocolates. He was just blooming and blossoming throughout the entire writing of Sex and the Single Girl.”

  Perhaps he sensed a hit, or at the very least, a balm for his wife’s misery on the job. And how she had needed his encouragement. “I never would have been me now except for David because I had a built-in, sleep-in editor.” More confident, she tore through the rest of her introductory chapter and followed it with a second called “The Men in Your Life,” a compendium of types and hunting grounds. Then she drafted a comprehensive outline, from aphrodisiacs to zits.

  There was one knotty contradiction to dispense with before she could go on; Helen had to address the fact that she was now writing from the Other Side, married and thrilled to be so. She had grabbed the brass ring after all, but she tempered her triumph with this flat declaration: “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.”

  Having secured her own insurance, she had no serious regrets about leaving her single years behind. Even though she had “crossed over,” she claimed good authority as an advisor: “I was single 37 years. Who better than me?”

  16

  We Have Liftoff!

  We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.

  —Senator John F. Kennedy, accepting the Democratic nomination for president, 1960

  You can fail in your brazenry. It’s no disgrace.

  —HGB, Sex and the Single Girl

  WHILE SHE WAS WRITING the beauty advice sections of her manuscript, gently scolding her single girls to get it together on lip-shaping (“What’s the matter you aren’t using a lipstick brush? Got the shakes? The stubborns?”), Helen made some bold aesthetic adjustments of her own. Though David had remarked upon her “salt and pepper” hair when they first met and seemed to find it attractive, she began a meaningful relationship with Miss Clairol’s “chestnut brown” shade, subduing the hints of gray with suitable brunette camouflage. She also indulged in the first of many plastic surgeries to come.

  Helen decided to have her nose “revised,” as she put it. She chose Dr. Michael M. Gurdin, who also worked on Marilyn Monroe’s chin—a fact only revealed a half century after the star’s death, when the late Dr. Gurdin’s surgical records were found in storage by his partner, Dr. Norman Leaf. Monroe had come incognito to their posh clinic, where her file was under “Marilyn Miller,” from her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller. Celebrity cosmetic surgery was still extremely hush-hush. Helen got the recommendation from her friend and officemate Marilyn Hart, whose nose job she judged to be “sensational.” Gurdin’s staff, quite experienced with high-maintenance women, had their hands full trying to prep the new patient for her procedure.

  Mrs. Brown, please!

  Helen’s face had turned red and puffy even before the gleaming scalpel was in the surgeon’s hand. Dr. Gurdin was perplexed, then annoyed, when his new patient sobbed so piteously, so ceaselessly as he attempted his pre-operative procedures that he could not administer the local anesthetic necessary. If she did not quiet down, he warned, he would send her back to her room in his clinic. Helen quit sniveling but the pattern would persist; even though her many ensuing cosmetic surgeries were by choice, she tended to carry on during pre-op like a Parisian duchesse facing the guillotine.

  Once the good doctor got busy, he effected a subtle resculpting. Profile and frontal photos of Helen and Cleo together show that Helen had the broader and rounded tip of the Sisco nose thinned around the nostrils; a small bump on the bridge was planed straight and narrow, ending in a WASPish point. She was thrilled with her modest emendation. As an early joiner of the growing trend for surgical enhancement, she was eager to trumpet its physical and psychological effects. She tucked her experience right into the end of her book-in-progress, in a section called “Kisses and Makeup.”

  “Plastic surgery is admittedly expensive, not covered by Blue Cross, horribly uncomfortable for a few days—but oh my foes and oh my friends—the results! The lovely cataclysmic results are the kind you can’t get any other way.” She explained that her new nose was like her first one but smaller; some friends who hadn’t seen her for a while didn’t notice. “They just tell me I look pretty, or rested, or something. Yes, plastic surgery is very, very ‘natural!’ … I’m just a cheerleader.”

  Helen had purchased her new nose during a time when plastic surgery was on the upswing. In the mid- to late 1940s, surgical innovations necessitated by horrific war wounds had introduced the developing specialty to the public in “miracle” stories about the restoration of badly wounded veterans. The press attention to reconstructive plastic surgery went a long way toward establishing the skill and advances in the surgical specialty. In 1946, a series of articles was published over three weeks in The American Weekly, a Hearst newspaper supplement that ran nationwide. The series umbrella title was “Farewell to Ugliness.” The articles drew a direct line from wartime surgical reconstruction to shoring up common “turkey neck” and other mortifications of the flesh: “The matron with too many crows feet around the eyes will have new hope and faith because of plastic surgery on wounded veterans.”

  For the surgical profession, there was an economic imperative. With peace came a sharp decline in patients. The doctors’ plan to expand the specialty is traced in Elizabeth Haiken’s study Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. “In the years after World War II,” Haiken wrote, “plastic surgeons led what would become a widespread trend toward marketing medical techniques and technologies to particular groups. The first problem they targeted was aging, and the first audience they targeted was female—specifically middle-aged, middle-class women.” Helen was squarely in the crosshairs of their campaign. She decided that her cheekbones would be next.

  What magazine trend pieces had been calling “the democratization of beauty”—more affordable potions and procedures for the middle class—was in keeping with a general uptick in national morale and expectations. Helen was pecking away at her outlier treatise as America stood at an optimistic threshold. The war had been over for a decade and a half; prosperity was holding. Seeds for technological advances sown in the fifties had surfaced and were vining upward.

  Americans even saw themselves differently. After generations of black-and-white pictorial, the nation began to dig itself in full, “living color,” most gloriously in Uncle Walt’s Fantasyland. With shrewd foresight, Disney had shot its films and TV shows in color. They ran in black-and-white until the wider adoption of color broadcast technology; in 1960, American families began gathering before the box religiously on Sunday evenings, enthralled by Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on NBC.

  On the sexual frontier, there was better living through chemistry; the expansion of sexual freedom that the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, Albert Ellis, and Charlie Cooke ha
d envisioned was finally at hand. The first oral birth control drug, commonly referred to as the Pill, was approved for general contraceptive use. Over the previous three years, half a million women had already begun using Searle’s Enovid 10 mg for menstrual disorders. Diaphragm use plummeted in favor of the more effective and easy-to-use pharmaceuticals. Being a habitual early adopter, from health food to yoga to psychotherapy, Helen would switch to the Pill in 1963.

  As the next election cycle churned forward and a telegenic young John Fitzgerald Kennedy—a Catholic!—began his campaign for the White House with his “New Frontier” acceptance speech, Helen saw her dear friends the Beldings dive into a frenzy of political activism on behalf of the opposition. Don Belding’s unpublished notes detail his growing friendship with and support of Richard Nixon. He huddled with the Republican candidate and provided him with a nineteen-point plan for campaign speechwriting. He received a warm thank-you and Nixon’s promise, never realized, of a place on the six-man “behind the scenes” team to draft the new Republican administration’s platform.

  Quietly, Helen had changed parties and become a Democrat again. Having married a liberal New Yorker, the old-time southern Democrat found her return to the fold made good sense and better domestic harmony—at least at the time. Maintaining her distance from the Beldings’ Republican fiestas was prudent for Mrs. Brown, though not because of any political disagreements. There were some dicey overlaps in her old friends’ social circles. When the Beldings gave a party for the Nixons, Don Belding ushered the guests of honor into his hotel suite. “There they met our other guests,” Belding wrote. “Three of Omar Bradley’s aides and their wives, Clifton, McDuff and Matthews.” Since Helen had executed some hot field maneuvers with both Clifton and Matthews, the sight of her chatting over canapés with those good army wives might have rendered the military men paler than the blanched asparagus tips.